To fix the crash on Win 8 or Win 8.1 where the game closes after playing the intro's please do the following :-

Open Control Panel,click on Programs than Turn Windows features on or off .

Under the Legacy Components tab , click DirectPlay.

Than apply.

It should work than.

Thanks for reading roders

p.s thanks to the person i copied the fix from...i just reworded it.

This. Very much 100% this.

I was getting a crash with the error "The ordinal 3 could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\GOG Games\Star Wars - Galactic Battlegrounds\Game\battlegrounds_x1.exe" and after a wild goose chase into missing dependencies we found that DirectPlay not being installed was the only real problem.

The installer doesn't prompt for it or enable it, the game doesn't properly prompt for it, you just get this cryptic error that means nothing to normal people when the fix is really just like 5 clicks.